Counting Birds
This weekend volunteers across the UK have been counting birds in their gardens as part of the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. I spent a sunny hour on Sunday afternoon counting visitors to our garden and trying to get some photos of the variety of birds seen. I have a 200mm lens on my Canon M6 but could probably have benefitted from something longer. When I uploaded my 36 observations there had been over 4 million bird counts added. I was also curious to see how my observations over an hour matched with those recorded by my Birdnet-Pi installation. Results below.
The list of birds observed in the garden (and in the large Horse Chestnut and Oak that boarder onto the allotment) included:
- Long-Tailed Tit (2)
- Blackbird (2)
- Coal Tit (3)
- House Sparrow (1)
- Goldfinch (3)
- Robin (2)
- Starling (10 tree at the end of the garden full of them!)
- Woodpigeon (3)
- Magpie (2)
- Great Tit (2)
- Parakeet (4)
- Red-breasted Nuthatch (1)
- Goldcrest (1)
The task was to only record the largest group of one species seen at the same time - ie the Goldfinches were there about half the time but the greatest number seen together in one go were 3. In total 36 observations were submitted and looking at the photos later I realised I forgot to add in a couple of Blue Tit sightings!
Most of the birds were quite familiar and regular visitors but I don’t recall seeing a Goldcrest in the garden. It was making use of the pond to have a bath.
The screenshot below shows the Birdnet-Pi data for the same day - I was observing around 2.10-3.10pm. I was expecting the microphone to be picking up more than I was seeing - looks like that might not be the case. An area for further investigation!
Photos are on Flickr:
